Image XP HD

pyropetepete · 3 Dec 2011 at 18:41

Got a friend bless her with a 5 year old PC which went down today. She's never ever backed up. The system refuses to go into Windows XP desktop. Tried drive on a different machine. Same result.

Whats the chance of being able to image the drive/clone what ever it is (never done this before) on to a spear drive, stick in my spear machine, boot it up as an XP machine, rip all her stuff (mainly e-mails in outlook) as if machine was working?

She is going to get a new machine and drive. Can this be done?

pyropetepete · 3 Dec 2011 at 20:55

Anyone?

marms · 3 Dec 2011 at 21:07

you probably won't be able to boot from the drive on another computer, your best bet is to connect the drive to your computer as a secondary drive, then boot into your normal operating system and try to recover the files from there.

skyripper · 4 Dec 2011 at 10:11

You may well be able to achieve what you are after. Try booting into Safe mode using her drive.

OR build a Virtual Machine using VMWare or VirtualBox, attach your friends hard drive to that and see if you can make that boot.

Adding it as a secondary to your own and just hoovering up the files is going to be easiest though.

Check in Documents and Settings as well as places like the AppData directory as well. iTunes, outlook etc. oftens store data files in odd places, but a search (or google) should be able to track them down.